It's pretty much a mantra by now used to defend wildly unlimited open carry of even the most lethal of semi-automatic and fully-automatic killing machines:
"The only that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
This idiocy is used to defend the idea of as many people packing heat as possible to deal with, you know, shooters walking into an elementary school and mowing down kids and teachers. Unfortunately, that maxim has an absolutely fatal flaw, which I will now explain:
If everyone can carry, there is no way to tell the good guys from the bad guys until it's too late. That this even needs to be explained is depressing beyond imagination, but let's give it a shot. Pun intended.
"If everyone at that school had been armed, that kid would never have been able to kill 19 children."
Really? And how does that work, exactly? Because if everyone has the right to strap an AR-15 to their back and wander around freely, then how do you tell the good guys from the bad guys in the first place?
So some guy in full camo and an assault rifle enters a school. Is he there to cause mayhem? Or maybe, because he has the legal right, he's just come from deer hunting and is there to pick up his daughter. How can you know the difference? What makes him an obvious "bad guy"? He enters a classroom full of kids. Is there any cause for alarm yet? How are you going to know, until he unslings his AR-15 and starts shooting kids? If everyone is free to wander around with a fully-loaded assault weapon, then there's nothing you can do when someone so equipped walks into a school. Or a church. Or a synagogue.
Until they start shooting. By then, it's kinda too late, but I assume you figured that out by now.
10 comments:
Yeah, the argument also false apart when the professionaly trained "good guys with guns" wait around for almost an hour before reacting.
“Law Abiding Gun Owner” is also a self-selecting group. They’re all “law abiding” until they aren’t.
I also wonder if any of them have given so much as an ounce of thought to how their hobby results in both increased costs to the public, but also is corrosive to the cohesion of society?
There's another flaw with everyone carrying a gun, and that's friendly fire. So you have a bunch of open-carry guys in a shopping mall, some nut opens up on the crowd, and the others (the "good guys") all pull out their guns and then do what? They hear gunfire, they look around, and see a dozen other guys with guns drawn, some of them firing. So who do you shoot? How do you tell the bad guy from all the good guys if you didn't personally see the first shots? All you see now are a bunch of targets, and now that you've drawn your gun, other guys see you as a threat because they don't know any better either.
And then the cops show up and all they see is a dozen guys, shooting at other people. So what do THEY do? It's just chaos with a lot of well-meaning "good guys" getting blown away by other good guys and the cops.
Didn't the 19 cops each have a sidearm that remained holstered for an hour?
Do you own a gun? If not, then sit down and be quiet and let the adults with skin in the game talk about firearms control.
Do you burn hydrocarbons? If so, then sit down and be quiet about CO2 emissions control, you hypocrite. You are as bad as fat people wanting to lose weight who continue to eat some food anyway.
Sincerely,
Jenni's daily memes
The two halves of the conservative argument fit together so well, don't they?
a) We need to eliminate any unfair requirement that firearm purchasers show proof of training, mental health, and absence of a criminal record.
b) We should flood the market with guns and that'll take care of gun violence by the untrained, the mentally ill, and the criminal element.
There was an old news story on the internet going around last major shooting. They gave actual gun/shooting training to a number of young people with varying pre-existing gun experience. Then they put them in a university classroom setting and had a fake shooter with a paint gun come in and pretend to shoot the teacher and at the students as they ran away. Every single one of the students, even though they were given a gun and training instinctively ducked and hid or ran when the “shooting” happened. The only student who managed to draw and shoot back did so mostly blindly and risked hitting other innocent people in the panic if of the moment. The trainee later said you’d have to have many years of dedicated training like cops get in order to react properly because “duck and cover” or blindly shooting is your normal instincts in that situation. calmly firing back takes ongoing dedicated training and practice specifically for that situation.
I am reminded of the incident below where an armed citizen engaged and killed a shooter only to be killed by police who believed he was the shooter.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/colorado-good-samaritan-killed-by-police
One thing that hasn't been considered enough is the relationship between widespread gun ownership and police violence. What's become increasingly clear is that the police, on average, are paranoid cowards. If they suspect everyone they interact with of having a gun, they become more and more likely to kill them just out of fear. So if there are fewer guns out there, hopefully the police will become less fearful and so less likely to lash out violently and kill people.
Police only shoot you if they think you have a gun. If you do have a gun and have proven it by firing it, they stand in the hallway.
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